Podcasts Arrive to Play Music Web, Android Coming Soon

Podcasts, the modern equivalent of radio shows, have finally come to Google Play Music. Users will be able to subscribe to shows, receive notifications when there’s new episodes, and sync your playback status across all of your devices. Unlike other podcast apps like PocketCasts, this service is entirely free for Google users.

Right now, the update is only available on the web, but it can quickly give you a glance of what’s to come. The time remaining is shown for each episode, and you can click on the info button next to each episode to get a full set of show notes. There are buttons to quickly subscribe and share the podcast, and the player at the bottom gives users the ability to skip forward and back. There is not variable playback speed, at least on the web, so this feature may not come to Android either.

Will podcasts come to Google Play Music on Android TV? I would imagine, as it is a feature that would need to be added for feature parity compared to its phone equivalent. The only other podcast app on Android TV (aside from Kodi) is Radioline, to there’s definitely a gap in the market. Casting podcasts should be supported out of the box when the update comes to Android, so users will definitely have the ability to listen to all their podcasts when this feature rolls out to everyone. Shifty Jelly, the developers of PocketCasts, have said they’re not planning on an Android TV version, but do support the ability to cast shows to your TV.

Currently, podcasts through Google Play are only available in US and Canada, and there’s not a lot of podcasts currently shown. Podcast owners will need to add their podcast through the integrated portal.

Nick Felker is a student Electrical & Computer Engineering student at Rowan University (C/O 2017) and the student IEEE webmaster. When he's not studying, he is a software developer for the web and Android (Felker Tech). He has several open source projects on GitHub (http://github.com/fleker)
Devices: Moto G-2013 Moto G-2015, Moto 360, Google ADT-1, Nexus 7-2013 (x2), Lenovo Laptop, Custom Desktop.
Although he was an intern at Google, the content of this blog is entirely independent and his own thoughts.